Garden State

The world smells green & wet & today I
am in a postlapsarian good mood 
as I meander by the Raritan canal, 
no longer moving in a deadly torpor 
like a winter fly, but thinking once again 
(the warming weather) about sex in a good way, 
how all those smells you’re supposed to be ashamed of 
or wash away smell good once you know a thing or two, 
& it’s finally humid enough, this second day 
after the rains, it is spring in New Jersey, 
I itch my eyes freely & blink down on gnats 
that seem determined to die in my field of 
so-close-I-can’t-see-them, & people are out, 
look at all their beautiful bodies, so many 
ankles & knees, clicking whizz of bike wheels, 
car exhaust hanging in the thick air, 
helmets pressing sweaty hair to sticky foreheads, 
a racket of motors on the other side of these trees, 
early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy, 
this is no prologue but the thing itself, the mud 
& the grease & the grass & the wet asphalt 
on one of those steaming, streaming, sunlit evenings 
after a week of rain that brought out the frogs 
to cover the road up the hill. There they were. 
No one knew where they were going.